I Beat the Odds (20 page)

At the end of the season, having started all sixteen games, I was named to the All-Rookie team by the Pro Football Writers of America, and I was runner-up for the AP’s NFL Offensive Rookie of the Year Award. It was a pretty amazing end to an amazing season.

But just because our season was over didn’t mean that I could sit back and relax until training camp started up again in July. I know how many guys out there would love to take my job, and I know that the minute I stop pushing myself to get better, one of them will step up for the chance. I got my position because someone else lost his; that’s the way the game works, and I always try to keep that in mind so I never take for granted the opportunities I’ve been given.

A lot of people want to know what it’s like to be a celebrity, and I feel bad when the most honest answer I can give them is “I don’t know.” But it’s the truth. I don’t feel like a celebrity and I don’t live like one. I try to stay grounded, live simply, pay cash for everything, and just focus on doing my job. I try not to get into the “celebrity” mind-set because then it becomes easy to think you can slack off just because you’re a big name. It also means you’ve forgotten where you came from and the hard work and discipline that got you to this level of success. The minute you start thinking that your reputation is enough to carry you is the moment that you start to slip.

No matter where I am—if I’m in Maryland or Memphis or somewhere on vacation—I work out every day. When I’m home visiting my family, I always carve out a few days to drive down to Oxford for a couple of days of intense training at my old field and gym at Ole Miss. There are several former Rebels who do that, and the coaches have told us that it’s a good thing for the younger players to see us there working out because some of the younger guys think that once you make it to the pros your work is done and it’s just about collecting a paycheck. The truth is, once you make it to the pros, you have to work harder than ever.

That’s really my goal—to be the hardest-working guy in the NFL. My conditioning coaches sometimes tease me because I am so stubborn about getting in my workouts. I never, ever miss a practice, never miss a training session. Some of my friends think it’s funny that I’m working on flexibility with the goal of doing a full split. I know guys my size don’t really seem like the bendy gymnast type, but I’ve heard that there are one or two tackles out there on other teams who can do the splits, so that’s become one of my motivations: If they can do it, I should be able to, too. It’s about always looking forward and making sure that you give your job all that you’ve got. If I lose my starting position, it had better be because there was someone out there with more talent, not because I just didn’t push myself enough.

D
uring my junior year of high school, while I was staying with the Tuohys but before I had moved in permanently, I met a childhood friend of Sean’s named Michael Lewis. He was in town to talk to Sean for an article he was writing about their high school baseball coach for the
New York Times Magazine
, and he seemed to find me an interesting and surprising addition to their family.

Sean had picked Lewis up at the airport and brought him back to the house, where I was working on homework. I had become such a normal part of the Tuohys’ lives by that point that I guess it didn’t occur to them to mention that I was a part-time resident of the house. It seemed to really throw Lewis off to see me in the house with everyone acting as if it was the most natural thing in the world for a big kid from the ghetto to be working through algebra problems at the dining room table.

As for me, I didn’t really give him another thought, since I was up to my ears in homework and sports practice. But apparently, curiosity about me and my story started eating away at Lewis and would continue to bug him for about six months after he left.

In the meantime, Sean and Lewis struck up their friendship again and enjoyed laughing about their own teenage years growing up in New Orleans. Several times they ended up seeing each other while Sean was traveling on the road working as a commentator for the Memphis Grizzlies. They were hanging out together, in fact, when Sean got the call about the car accident I was in with S.J. my senior year of high school. The more Lewis was around our family, the more he started to wonder about my story. Lewis started asking Sean more questions about who I was, where I had come from, and why on earth I was living with them. Sean told him what he knew, but since I didn’t like to talk too much about my past and I was still pretty quiet in general, there wasn’t a whole lot that he could share except from the point that I’d started at Briarcrest.

Lewis talked to his wife about what he had learned from Sean, and his wife immediately felt it could be a great story and told him he should look into doing a piece for the magazine about me. He called his editor and pitched the story to him as a
Pygmalion
piece—a story about a young person from the poor side of town who has his life and opportunities turned around by learning what’s necessary to succeed in mainstream society. Ironically, that very same play would end up being one of my favorite pieces of literature I was studying around that same time.

He began to do some digging to see what he could piece together about my past. In the meantime, my senior year started, my football really began to take off, and the college recruiting began to really crank up. The more Lewis tried to learn about me, the more he felt that there was too much of a story just for a magazine article. At the same time, he had begun to research the left tackle position for his next book, which, in his usual style, was going to be a study of how something seemingly minor changed the whole shape of the game. In this case, it was how Joe Theismann’s career-ending injury when he was sacked by Lawrence Taylor in 1985 changed the nature of football. This led a lot of coaches to see the importance of the left tackle to protect right-handed quarterbacks (and right tackle for lefties). Basically, they need someone strong to protect their blind side, since they can’t see how or when they are being charged. The position grew to be much more heavily scrutinized, trained for, and highly paid than before—and it could all be traced back to that one game.

Lewis quickly figured out that since I also played left tackle, he’d found a link for his story line: Something as small as enrolling in a private school or making a bond with the Tuohy family could change my life the way that one play on one night changed the game of football. He talked to his editor at the
Times
magazine again and they agreed that instead of the article they were planning to run, the magazine would instead get first dibs to run a chapter from the book that Lewis was going to write.

For the next year and a half or so, Lewis worked on his book, analyzing football rosters and team payrolls, as well as traveling to Memphis to talk to a lot of people who had known me when I was younger. A few times he would call Sean and Leigh Anne late at night to report his location, as he knew he was in some of the most dangerous neighborhoods in Memphis. I guess he figured if he got killed, they would know roughly his last location. He went by a lot of my old schools and old hangouts and tried to talk with anyone he could who had a connection to me, in an effort to piece together the details of my early life. Of course, by that point, I was getting to be a well-known college prospect and then a successful freshman at Ole Miss, so a lot of people suddenly were willing to step up and take credit for my success.

For a long time, though, I was pretty unaware of what Lewis was doing as he tried to get my story right for his book. He had talked to me about wanting to work me into a book he was working on, but that just sounded so crazy to me that I didn’t give it a lot of thought and I didn’t share much information with him. I mean, what was so interesting about me? Who would want to write a book about my life? What was there even to say that would fill up a newspaper column, let alone two hundred or more pages? Besides, I had tried to put a lot of stuff out of my mind in order to make it to where I was. At the time, I really couldn’t see the point in pulling it all back up again. I just kind of figured he was some eccentric friend of Sean’s and it would all blow over soon. Besides, I was starting college, so I had a lot more pressing things on my mind.

Eventually, I got the message that this Michael Lewis guy was actually planning to do something with my story. I had started hearing from people that he had talked to them about me—it seemed he had talked to everyone about me. So I decided to do two things that I thought were important: I googled his name and I gave him a call.

First of all, I wanted to learn more about him. I mean, it’s only fair if he was trying to learn all about me, right? I typed in his name and read all about
Moneyball
and how he broke down the way that some baseball teams were able to build surprisingly good teams without having the highest payroll. What he said really made sense, and it occurred to me that maybe this guy knew a thing or two about sports after all. Then, when I saw that he had a number of other books published, too, I realized that he was definitely not just some weirdo with a tape recorder and a strange interest in the ghettos of Memphis.

When I called him from my dorm room at Ole Miss, I asked him the question he loves to share when discussing
The Blind Side
: “Are you the guy who keeps asking every other person in the world questions about me when you could just come and ask me?”

Yes, it turned out, he was that guy.

“Man, you’re big time!” I laughed. And after that, we struck up a bit more of a conversation. He was just wrapping up his writing of the book, so the timing worked out well. After a couple of discussions, he felt he had the story he needed to help bring a human face to the position of left tackle.

I think we all sort of thought that that was the end of it all: The book was finished and probably would be a big hit with sports guys and people interested in strategy, and that was it. After all, no one gets that wrapped up in a football story, right? Obviously, we were wrong.

 

 

THE BOOK WAS RELEASED LATE in 2006. The
Times
chose to run as their exclusive scoop on the book a piece called “The Ballad of Big Mike,” which was all about me and how I ended up where I was. The story was in the September 24, 2006, issue of the magazine, during the fall of my second year of college. To be honest, the book didn’t really affect me much at first—initially I think it was mostly football fans who were reading it. It hadn’t yet become a huge phenomenon.

Less than two years later, the movie rights were sold and Lewis was working on a screenplay with John Lee Hancock, who would go on to direct the movie. It turns out that football fans weren’t the only people reading the book. Most people weren’t excited about the ins and outs of the left and right tackle positions; they were connecting with the human side of the story.

Filming started in Atlanta in the spring of 2009 as I was finishing up my senior year of college and getting ready to graduate. I was way too busy focusing on the last of my classes to be too worried about any of that. I had heard that Sandra Bullock had signed on to play Leigh Anne, which seemed like good casting to me; Sandra seemed like she was strong enough to pull off the role in a way that would really help get Leigh Anne’s personality across to people who didn’t know her.

When the movie opened in New York in November, I couldn’t go to the premiere. The Ravens were in the middle of their season and our next opponent was the Colts. There was no way I could take off time from getting ready for a game against one of our toughest opponents. The Tuohys all went, though. Leigh Anne was in a black evening gown; Collins wore a purple one. They both looked really beautiful from the pictures I saw. Sean and S.J. were both in suits, and S.J. wearing an Ole Miss tie, which I thought was pretty cool.

The film also had a debut in New Orleans the day after its New York premiere. That was a great choice, since Sandra cares a lot about that city. She bought a house there and has been helping support a lot of local students since Hurricane Katrina wiped everything out. Also, her little boy Louis was adopted from New Orleans, and she was quietly finishing up the last stages of that process as the movie was opening. Sean also grew up in New Orleans; his dad was a famous high school basketball coach with an amazing record and a great reputation as a character. So it made sense to celebrate the movie in a city that could really use some positive excitement. But again, I wasn’t able to be there because of my work schedule and our upcoming game on Sunday.

As a matter of fact, I didn’t end up seeing the movie until the season was over in early January. It had already been in the theaters for over a month by then, and I had several guys on other teams say, “Hey, Hollywood!” when we faced one another on the line. The funny thing was, they were mostly nice about the movie; several of them said they liked it a lot. For a bunch of guys who make a living trash-talking and tackling one another on the field, it was nice to know that they were happy for me.

When I finally went to watch it, I went with a couple of my teammates and just bought a ticket to the show like a normal person. I didn’t tell anyone at the theater who I was or that the movie was about me. I just wanted to see it the way anyone else would.

My feelings afterward were mixed. First of all,I couldn’t understand why so many people around me were sniffing and blowing their noses at the end. I wanted to stand up and say, “You realize that was a
happy
ending, right? I mean, I have a great life, a great family, and I am really thankful for all of the blessings I’ve been given. Things turned out really good for me—please don’t cry.”

But the other side of me had to deal with some wounded pride. I understand that there are certain things you have to do to make a story work as a movie; you may have to move some things around or play certain things up or down in order to help the audience buy into your characters and plot. I liked the movie as a movie, but in terms of it representing me, that’s where I had a hard time loving it. I felt like it portrayed me as dumb instead of as a kid who had never had consistent academic instruction and ended up thriving once he got it. Quinton Aaron did a great job acting the part, but I could not figure out why the director chose to show me as someone who had to be taught the game of football. Whether it was S.J. moving around ketchup bottles or Leigh Anne explaining to me what blocking is about, I watched those scenes thinking, “No, that’s not me at all! I’ve been studying—really studying—the game since I was a little kid!” That was my main hang-up with the film. I liked the book pretty well, but I knew more people were going to watch the movie than read the book and I really didn’t want them to think I was someone who was so clueless about something I had always taken pride in being pretty smart about.